Last Rites, page 17
His apartment was something else, man. It was like one step above a squat, and one step below student accommodation. He never opened the curtains. There were ashtrays and empties all over the place. And he had Nazi shit everywhere. Hitler Youth daggers. Iron Cross flags. SS uniforms. It was like the set of The Young Ones crossed with the Imperial War Museum.
He wasn’t a Nazi, obviously. ‘I only collect the stuff, I don’t collect the ideas,’ he used to say. He was just fascinated by that period of history. I’m the same way, and I’m married to a Jewish woman, so I hardly share the opinions of Adolf Hitler. You’ve gotta remember, we grew up right after the war, so it was still a very recent memory. In Aston when I was a kid, entire streets were still in ruins after the Birmingham Blitz. In the fields, there were still concrete pillboxes everywhere, so the Home Guard could defend the country if Hitler invaded. And everyone had a friend whose dad had seen action somewhere or other. The bottom line is, if you’re interested in dark subjects, the Nazis and the terrible things they did are the darkest of ’em all. That didn’t mean Lemmy was going around doing Sieg Heils and goosestepping.
The first demo I gave him was for ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’. I’d had the melody in my head for years. Then me and Zakk had sat down at the piano and worked out the whole song. But I didn’t have a clue what the words should be. ‘Take a listen to this,’ I said, ‘and see if anything comes to you.’
Then I remembered the book I’d been given on the plane. ‘Oh, and do you want this?’ I said, showing him the cover. ‘It’s about some German bloke.’
‘Okay,’ said Lemmy, lighting up his seven-hundredth fag of the day, ‘leave the demo with me, and yeah, I’ll take the book, cheers. When do you need the lyrics?’
‘As quickly as you can,’ I said.
‘Okay. Come back in two hours.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘What… you need ’em faster?’
‘What? No! Fucking hell, Lemmy. How are you gonna write lyrics in just two hours?’
‘It’s not War and Peace, Ozzy. It’s a song. Give me two hours.’
‘All right… if you say so,’ I said. I didn’t think he was serious. I was fully expecting to come back and find he’d written half a verse then fucked off to the Rainbow.
So I left him to it, and came back four or five hours later, just to be on the safe side.
As I walked in the door, he goes, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Then he hands me this sheet of lined paper with his lyrics carefully written out in longhand, with a couple of fag burns at the top. ‘Here you go.’
I looked at what he’d written, and my mouth fell open:
Times have changed and times are strange,
Here I come but I ain’t the same,
Mama, I’m coming home…
As anyone who’s close to me knows, ‘Mama’ is one of my pet names for Sharon. And Lemmy had somehow managed to capture the beautiful, fucked-up madness of our relationship and our life on the road – which I’d just tested to breaking point by getting fucked up on booze and pills and attacking her one night – with these words. I got chills as I was reading it. It was like he’d been able to peer into my soul. Later on, whenever I sang the song on stage, I’d have the same reaction.
I had tears running down my face by the time I got to the end.
‘Lemmy… I… I just don’t know what to say,’ I said.
‘You don’t like ’em?’ He shrugged. ‘That’s okay, I wrote two other versions.’ Then he handed me two other sets of handwritten lyrics for the same song. I just stood there, looking at ’em, in this state of total disbelief.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and that book you gave me?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s crap.’
‘What?? You can’t possibly have—’
‘Here you go,’ he said, shaking the fag ash off it and handing it back to me.
He’d already finished it.
Lemmy ended up writing four songs on No More Tears: ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’, ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, ‘Desire’ and ‘Hellraiser’. Later on, he said he’d earned more in publishing royalties from those four songs than he did from his entire Motörhead career. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I was very glad he got to earn some dough. On the other, if it’s true, Motörhead deserve a lot more recognition.
One of the many things I liked about working with Lemmy was that he was totally honest with his opinions. You’d play him something, and if he didn’t like it, he’d go, ‘That’s shit!’ He’d tell you straight. There was no sugar-coating with Lemmy. And he had the best sense of humour. I mean, one of his own songs was called ‘Killed by Death’. As far as great titles go, that’s right up there with Death at a Funeral, the Frank Oz movie.
After No More Tears, we worked together a few more times. Other than ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’, the song of ours I really love – also written with Zakk’s help – is ‘See You on the Other Side’. It’s on the Ozzmosis album. The title’s a reference to a standing joke we had whenever we were getting fucked up – along the lines of, ‘Which one of us will live to see tomorrow morning?’ Mind you, a lot of people back then thought we’d live for ever. You’d hear stand-up comedians saying things like, ‘What kind of world are we gonna leave for Lemmy, Ozzy and Keith Richards?’
In the end, I’ve gotta say, it wasn’t a total surprise that I outlived Lemmy. There came a point where I slowed down. He never did. He kept the pedal to the metal, even when he could see the brick wall up ahead. His last gig was in Berlin, just a couple of weeks before he died in LA.
The last time I saw him was on a plane going to Rio. It must have been April 2015. We were doing the Ozzy & Friends tour in South America. Motörhead were part of it. Geezer and Slash were there. Lemmy was sitting up at the front, so we didn’t have much of a conversation or anything. He’d dropped so much fucking weight, man. I remember him walking down the jetty thing when we got off, and his legs… he had his cowboy boots on, and his legs were like sticks inside.
‘Yeah, I’m probably gonna die,’ he said to me at one point during that trip. ‘But I never thought I’d make it this far, so I did good, as far as I’m concerned.’
He was sixty-nine at the time, turning seventy on Christmas Eve.
It was cancer that got him. He was riddled with it. I saw the same thing happen to my father after a lifetime of breathing in all kinds of toxic shit at the GEC factory where he worked. But as Lemmy himself said, the fact he lasted as long as he did, when he lived his entire life like he was twenty years old, was quite an achievement. When we got back to LA, I heard from friends that his health was declining. I was texting him all the time. ‘If you need anything, call me.’ He’d text right back, ‘Thanks for caring.’
A week before his seventieth birthday, just after he got back from Berlin, they held a concert for him at the Whisky a Go Go. Slash was there. Billy Idol. Lars Ulrich from Metallica flew in. After that, Lemmy was pretty much bedridden. Apparently, the Rainbow unplugged the video poker machine from the bar and took it over to his flat. Meanwhile, he’d cut down on the fags. He’d switched from Jack and Coke to vodka and orange juice. But he was still doing the old speed.
And he made it to seventy, God bless him. But four days later, he was gone.
I phoned him up on the day he died. I kept wanting to talk to someone who was with him, but whoever was there just kept putting Lemmy on the line. He couldn’t talk at that point. All he could do was groan down the line at me. I kept asking, ‘Is Lemmy okay? Can someone give me an update?’ But all I got were these groans in return. It was fucking awful. I really, truly hope he wasn’t in too much pain. I had to hang up in the end. I thought to myself, I’d rather remember him as I want to remember him. It was so frustrating and sad. Then a few hours later, the news came through: we’d lost him. But he made his mark, man. The patio at the Rainbow is called Lemmy’s Lounge now. There’s apparently a statue of him there. And ‘Ace of Spades’ will never, ever get old. Meanwhile, he had his ashes put in bullet casings and sent out to all his friends.
God bless you, Lemmy. You were a warrior and a legend.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Aside from Lemmy, I’ve had the privilege of hanging out with a few of the other great hellraisers in rock ’n’ roll history. But what people don’t realise is, in the early days of Sabbath, I was the sensible one, relatively speaking.
Take the one and only occasion I spent time with Keith Moon from The Who. I’d been invited to some charity concert in Coventry that Tony had helped organise. Moon was there ’cos Tony had made friends with him when they both played The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. That was during the five minutes when Tony was in Jethro Tull.
Now, my favourite thing to wear in those days was the tasselled suede shirt I’d brought home from America. I thought it was the bee’s knees, that shirt. I’d wear it with a matching suede tobacco pouch clipped to my belt, and the necklace with a tiny coke spoon on the end. I couldn’t have been much older than twenty-three at the time. I thought I was this sophisticated, worldly rock star. But really I was still just a wide-eyed kid.
Moon was already pretty arseholed when we got there, even though it was early in the day. What you’ve gotta remember is, not only was he a couple of years older than me, but he was also on a different level entirely. The Who had been going for five years by then, and Who’s Next had just come out, with ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ on it. They were at their peak. On top of that, Moon was known for being one of the craziest fuckers on the face of the earth. Two or three years earlier, at his birthday party, he’d driven a Lincoln Continental – then the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce – into a Holiday Inn swimming pool. Just for a laugh.
Moon hadn’t come to the charity thing alone. He’d brought his mate Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Another stage-five nutter. This would have been just before Stanshall did that track on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells where he just walks around a country house, shitfaced.
All I remember is being in the canteen of whatever this venue was, with all these kids running around – maybe that’s what the event was for, a kids’ charity – and Moon and Stanshall were sitting on the floor, completely arseholed, falling about laughing, ripping the piss out of anyone who walked by. I felt so intimidated by them. They were these huge rock stars and I was still the new kid on the block, y’know?
And of course the second I walked in there, my shirt caught Moon’s attention. He kept coming up to me and going, ‘Hey man,’ in this fake hippie accent. ‘You look so cool in that shirt, man, you really do, man.’
Over and over again. He just wouldn’t get off my case. Neither would Stanshall. Meanwhile, I was totally sober, ’cos in those days, I wasn’t in the habit of getting loaded at a kids’ charity event at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Eventually I managed to lose ’em, but then during the rehearsal for the gig later on, I was standing on the side of the stage and Moon spotted me. Fuck, I thought. But now, on top of doing the whole ‘hey man’ thing, he’d run up to me and just put his hand in my pouch. The first time, I kind of smiled and brushed him off. But he kept doing it, and doing it – finding it funnier and funnier – until eventually it really started to piss me off.
‘Hey man—’
‘WILL YOU JUST FUCK OFF!’
I almost decked the guy.
They were a pair of clowns, Moon and Stanshall, looking back. And I suppose they were giving me a taste of my own future medicine, ’cos it wouldn’t be long before I caught up with them and became a clown myself.
They’d do all kinds of outrageous shit, I’ve since learned. Like dressing up in Nazi uniforms before going out on the town. Meanwhile, Moon once tried to put his waterbed in a lift, so it would explode when it got to the lobby. And of course he loved food fights and throwing TVs out of hotel windows. Also blowing up toilets with M-80 firecrackers, something I also came to enjoy… which I’ll get to in a minute. But I wasn’t in on the joke that day. And thank God for that. I mean, imagine if Moon the Loon, Stanshall and me had become drinking buddies. We’d have been the dynamic trio. None of us would have lived to see 1973.
Moon was an electrifying drummer, of course. I mean, ‘My Generation’, fucking hell. No one was playing drums like that in 1965. He was like this wild animal, but so precise at the same time. Not that I was ever a crazy fan of The Who. But Pete Townshend always had a good vibe. I actually got to meet him once, at Sabbath’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. We were crying with laughter, we were having such a good time.
Moon tragically didn’t make it to the end of the seventies because of his accidental overdose. But in some ways, it’s amazing The Who even survived the sixties. Very few bands were as famous as they were during that decade and kept it going for as long as they did. And the sixties cost a lot of people their minds. I never knew Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd – who famously went crazy, which apparently inspired their Wish You Were Here album – but I’ll never forget the time I ran into Peter Green from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers (and later Fleetwood Mac) at an awards show in London. What year this was, I honestly can’t tell you. But I hadn’t seen Green out in public for years – no one had – ’cos he’d quit the music game and become a grave digger. He wanted nothing more to do with music, apparently, so I dunno why he was even at this event. And he walks in wearing a handkerchief on his head with four knots on top.
It was just very odd. I heard from someone in the business he was still getting pretty big royalty cheques, but he kept sending ’em back to the record company, saying, ‘I don’t want these, fuck off.’ Even a cheque for forty grand. He was like, ‘You’ve really gotta stop sending me this shit.’
It must have been very sad for the guy’s friends and family, not to mention his bandmates.
He was still there, but he was gone.
Within a couple of years of that charity thing, I was drinking far more often, and far more heavily. Any kind of event, no matter what the time of day, was an excuse to get lollied. And although I didn’t see Moon or Stanshall again, I did run into John Entwistle, The Who’s bass player.
I was in London, I remember. At the time I was very friendly with the comedian Billy Connolly. I’d got to know him while we were on the road, ’cos often we’d stay at the same places. This was when he was still drinking and doing powder. He gave all that shit up in the early eighties when met his wife Pam. On this occasion, though, he was still at it, and he was having a big book launch party. If I had to guess, it would have been for a collection of those comic strips he did at the time, called The Big Yin.
Now, in those days, I’d often while away an afternoon in London doing blow and drinking beer in our manager’s office. Which is exactly what I’d just done. So by the time I got to this book launch – which started at five o’clock on a weekday – I was absolutely shitfaced. The event was on the basement level of some bar or restaurant, I remember, and I was staggering down the stairs just as Entwistle was coming up.
He stopped me as we passed. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ he asked.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’m the singer of a band called Black Sabbath.’
He just went, ‘Oh, yes,’ and carried on. That was it, my one encounter with Entwistle. Next thing I knew, I was in this hot and loud basement packed full of journalists and celebrities. And suddenly I’m starting to feel absolutely knackered and next-level loaded at the same time. And I’m standing beside this huge board thing – like a frieze, maybe even displaying pages of the book, I don’t know – and I’m so tired, I start to lean against it. I thought it was part of the building, not something that could fall over. And of course I go crashing right through this thing, hit the floor with a wallop, and this huge display collapses on top of me, and I’m lying there covered in bits of foam and cardboard and whatever, while the metal posts that were holding it up are rolling around the floor.
All I remember is looking up and seeing this crowd forming around me, everyone still chatting away and eating nibbles and holding their champagne glasses. Then out of the crowd comes the face of one of the most famous men on earth, the footballer Bobby Moore, who’d captained the England team back when they beat Germany in the World Cup.
‘Oh, hello there,’ he goes.
Then he fucks off again as I’m groaning and trying to get back to my feet.
That was the first time my drinking really started to cause me problems in public.
There was no looking back after that. I was off to the races. Although in the seventies, it wasn’t so much the drinking itself that was the problem. It was the things I did when I was drinking. And it was during our tours of America that it all started to get out of hand.
What none of us in Sabbath could get over was how easy it was to buy cherry bombs in America, or M-80s as they were called over there. Except like everything else in America, M-80s were far, far more powerful than any kind of firework they’d ever let you buy in England. I mean, the American military would use ’em as practice bombs, they packed that much of a punch. And you could buy these things just about anywhere. Meanwhile, the only limit on how many you could buy in one go was how much cash you had, and how many they had in stock. The likes of Keith Moon were buying five hundred at a time. If you tried that today, they’d think you were a domestic terrorist. Except you can’t buy M-80s today, ’cos they’re illegal now, which in all honesty they should have been all along. I mean, yeah, they can be safe if you use them carefully. But no one was using ’em carefully. People used ’em to fuck around.
